Who needs a holiday?

The Scottish summer has arrived – for the first time in quite a few years – and I am enjoying the sunshine and heat tremendously. My bones and pinched nerves are also loving it.

Of course, we are not used to such temperatures here any more, and my brain keeps thinking it is already on holiday on some foreign shores!

So every piece of work feels like treacle. Sweet, delicious treacle. Slow-moving and sensuous. But treacle, all the same!

The next few weeks will be tough, but we’re keeping on track because we finally managed to confirm a house swap holiday in August. After our original swap partners pulled out, we were worried that we wouldn’t be able to arrange anything at such short notice.

After sending out many requests in vain, we finally received an email from a Spanish family who wanted to exchange their holiday apartment with our home here in Scotland.

Our home exchange history has seen us arrange consecutive swaps and travel for many weeks with our laptops, as we continue to work in various locations. This time, however, we are trying out something new.

We’re going to fly straight to the holiday apartment and stay there for two weeks, doing nothing!

A whole new adventure. But, oh how we need to rest our weary heads after the couple of years of some quite tough going. Even the teenager feels it – and he’s generally like a monkey up a stick and not able to sit still for longer than a millisecond, but even he is looking forward to a change of pace.

But we’re not there yet – and meantime I’m gonna keep at it like treacle, knowing that I can eventually slow to a stop in only a short while.

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2 Comments

I am currently in Colomiers, France, a suburb of Toulouse. I’ll be moving onto Bordeaux and Salamanca before going home to the US. I have been home exchanging for 24 years.

Colomiers is #52. Someone called me the Queen of Home Exchange. I don’t know about that. I know someone who has done over 60!

Great way to travel, but, yes, people can pull out and leave you with nothing. I had people from Krakow who swore they would never do that and, when asked to reconfirm for 2014, it turned out they were not committed at all. I told them to take a hike and got someone else–in Krakow. It currently looks like 3 exchanges in Poland for 2014, but we shall see.

Oh Lauren, that sounds like bad luck. One other partner family did pull out on us a few years ago, but they still made their home available for us to use. This time around, the family were involved in a car accident, so it was no fault of theirs.

There will always be some risk in this method of travel, but making sure you have a back up should definitely be part of your planning.We’ve made some great, long-term friends during our exchanges and look forward to many more.